The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 30 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Howard Lerman: Scheduled one-on-one meetings slow companies down by delaying urgent issues
“People, if they need to talk to you, they queue up the stuff they need to talk to you about until the meeting. So if I have a meeting with Kyle, with Kevin, on Thursday at two o'clock, let's say I need to meet him, and he's got something really urgent to tell …”
Howard Lerman: Startup founders should hold 8 PM Sunday night planning calls
“The frickin' founders who are starting the company and trying to do something impossible and move a rock up a mountain ought to be available at eight p.m. Sunday night for an hour and a half to plan out the week.”
Lerman: Replace outbound SDRs with equity-backed advisors for direct executive introductions
“Instead of investing heavily in BDRs and SDRs and outbound to generate demand, Use your stock options to bring on advisors who can make a fast introduction to the top people immediately and get you in. No BDRs can be able to get a meeting with the CEO of some …”
Lerman: Senior advisors make better enterprise BDRs than junior sales reps
“The best BDR, the most, the best BDRs are the most senior people because they're a phone call away and can easily meet people and the board. And so I really think founders ought to think about how to construct their board and our advisors in a way that they ca…”
Lerman: Group tours almost doubled onboarding conversion rates at Roam
“Well, Sam, it turned out that the percentage of people That chose to go on to the next step in our process went not quite, but almost doubled with the group tours.”
Howard Lerman: Presenters should let live demos break for audience sympathy points
“I strongly recommend doing Live demos that could break, and frankly, sometimes you should have it break, because people like it when stuff goes wrong. They do. You get sympathy points.”
Howard Lerman: The best time to send board decks is Saturday morning
“The best time to send a board deck is Saturday morning, the week before your board meeting”
Howard Lerman: Startups should vest advisor equity over one year, not four
“Make the stock only best over up to one year. Don't make it four years. When you hire employees, you make it, it's four years, because most advisors lose their, you just use up all their connections in six months.”
Lerman: Board chair is a purely ceremonial title with no power
“The chair of the board has no power. It's purely ceremonial. It's just a title. They call the meeting to order. That's all they do.”
Howard Lerman: Founders must never delegate product-market fit to anyone else
“The second to last thing you should delegate is recruiting, and then never, over your dead body, over your corpse, delegate product market fit. You as a found, and I'm speaking to the founders here, your job as a founder is always to completely own and dominat…”
Lerman: 100% of scaled companies are distributed
“Frankly, at Rome, we think that's all the wrong question because a hundred percent of scaled companies
Are distributed.”
Lerman: Slack is weak at direct messaging compared to Roam
“We've added features for group chat that make it possible for a company to not, if they want, use Slack, because we think we have a better approach for direct messaging in particular, where Slack is pretty weak.”
Lerman: Free B2B software creates sample bias and bad feedback
“There is an enormous, and I've seen in my career, like over and over and over again, a huge sample bias when you give something away for free and freeloaders that have no intention whatsoever of ever buying anything, but they're glad to use your product for fr…”
Lerman: Freemium models force SaaS companies to compete with themselves
“If you do something freemium, kind of your, You're competing with yourself. You create the free monster where you've got this freemium thing, and then you spend a lot of time trying to come up with a differentiated feature that people are going to pay for, and…”
Lerman: Events are the highest-ROI B2B customer acquisition channel
“Events, I think are, The highest ROI way to reach customers in B to B. If you can, it doesn't have to be much. It's not that expensive to put on a dinner.”
Lerman: Memorizing lines forces founders to simplify their pitch
“The point is, the act of memorizing your lines is one of composition, and you will find yourself continuously editing as you do it, and removing, and mainly it's subtraction. Mainly you're gonna be subtracting words you don't need, because I can almost assure …”
Lerman: Yext operated with 30 to 35 direct reports to the CEO
“I used to have, when I was running Yext, probably technically, 30 to 35 direct reports, but realistically, everybody reported to me, if that makes any sense.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang holds zero one-on-one meetings, says Howard Lerman
“So, Jensen, now, today, famously, has no one-on-one meetings. He barely has any meetings at all.”
Lerman: Roam Bundles Multiple Apps Into an All-in-One Cloud Headquarters
“Rome is an all-in-one cloud headquarters. It makes companies more productive with fewer and quicker and faster meetings. It makes them more connected by bringing the company together, the entire distributed company together under one roof, and it helps save th…”
Lerman: Roam has done zero marketing or outbound sales
“We haven't done any marketing and we haven't done any outbound. It's all just kind of been folks using the product.”
Lerman: Salesforce nixed Slack's monthly active user pricing model
“We went with monthly active users, which by the way is how Slack got started, But after the Salesforce acquisition, they nixed it. And so now you have to pay up front for the year and the kind of Salesforce more traditional sales model.”
Lerman: Roam has 93 founders on its cap table
“At Rome, my new company, we have 93 amazing founders in our cap table, and I'm a Phone call away, if you will, from any founder we want, because that's our target audience.”
Howard Lerman: Intuit considered acquiring Yext ten to twelve years ago
“One time Intuit thought about buying Yext. So this was 1012 years ago, way before we were public.”
Lerman: Roam has 182 paying customers and 4,000 paid active members
“As of yesterday, when I last checked, we had 182 paying customers and about 4000 paid active members.”
Lerman: Roam shipped 56 releases in its first 56 weeks
“And for the past, I guess, 56 weeks that we've been out there, we've had 56 different releases and, you know, continued to pack in improvements and features.”
Lerman chats directly with 50 to 100 Roam customers daily
“So I'm chatting with probably on the order of maybe 50 to 100 customers per on an average day.”
Lerman: The average Roam customer uses the product 5.9 hours daily
“The average customer in Rome is in our product for 5.9 hours per day.”
Lerman: Yext signed every gym by recruiting IHRSA's president as advisor
“In fact, when I started Yext, the very first thing I did, we were selling to gyms, and I called the founder and president of Ursa, which is the trade organization for gyms, and this was in And this is really old school. And he is now, you know, 78, 80, but I m…”
Lerman: Yext's iBeacon product 'Zone' was his biggest career failure
“One of the biggest failures of my career was a thing called a zone at Yext. It was a product that Used a beacon. I don't know if you remember the beacons, the iBeacon protocol that Apple launched, that basically was this Bluetooth thing that could wake up your…”